Hopefully, there is a special kind of hell for musicians that intentionally
rip-off their fellow musicians.
I know a guy who turned to flipping and sold his soul when he did. He'd rip
off old ladies from the vintage gear they didn't know they had from a deceased
husband or son. I ended up having to tell him he literally turned into a piece of
shit just to get a "deal," or acquire something he would then flip to someone else
at an enormous markup.
Sometimes it is not capitalism. It's just greed combined with a disconcerting lack of character.
Yep,
that is specifically
not capitalism. At least, not unless you add some modifier which subverts the noun, like "bassackwards capitalism" or "anti-market capitalism," or maybe just "capitalism for flaming a**holes."
The whole
argument for capitalism, by those that make it, is that it's
not a whole social or cultural or political or philosophical system (and was never
meant to be), but it's
merely a set of economic
best-practices which only work within the
context an otherwise-healthy society and culture and legal system. (Any Gordon-Gecko-wannabee who says "capitalism" is his "whole life-philosophy" is like someone who says a
carburetor is his
whole vehicle.)
And what makes them "best-practices" is that
normally, mutually-agreed exchanges of goods & services make people
better-off on
both sides of the trade (otherwise, at least one side
wouldn't agree to do it). Thus, the more often these mutually-beneficial exchanges happen, the more that "better-off-ness" increases within the economy overall. A simple-but-powerful idea.
But obviously that idea completely
fails if the person who's "agreeing" to an exchange is either...
(a.) too ignorant to know whether it makes him better-off or worse-off;
(b.) too deceived-and-defrauded to recognize whether it makes him better-off or worse-off; or,
(c.) too addicted (or otherwise compelled) to care whether it makes him better-off or worse-off.
In cases like
those, it will often happen that the "mutually-agreed" exchange makes one side
worse-off, which defeats the whole purpose of those best-practices. And this, of course, is why those practices only make sense in the context of a
legal system which (for example) prosecutes false advertising...and in a
society where most of the participants aren't
actively seeking to shaft their customers good-n-hard.
It all works pretty well in a world populated by fairly-decent persons, who treat every trade-interaction as an opportunity to do someone else a
good turn, and who think that "an informed customer is my best customer," and such-like.
But guys like the one you describe are "the reason we can't have nice things." They go 'round peeing in everybody's pool, and grinning about it. So,
yes, I suspect there
is a "special hell" for people like that...somewhere alongside the special hells for "child molesters, and people who talk at the theater."
